The first few weeks of this project was mainly spent researching and exploring concepts for the tools and assets that I will use to create my environment.

PROCEDURAL CITY LAYOUT GENERATOR

I started by finding resources for procedural city generation. The Unreal Engine Matrix city demo was very useful for figuring out and planning my method of city generation. My city does not need to be nearly as complicated, but on its most basic level the methods are the same.

I started making a VERY basic prototype in Houdini of the grid breakup system. It used a combination of Voronoi fractures and the Lot Subdivision node. This creates a nice non-uniform grid system. After this I would have to somehow get it to spawn points that the tool will then copy the ‘building footprints’ to.

However, I do want the user (being me) to be able to hand design the larger layout of the city, because I still want to be able to art direct the city to some degree. After speaking with Eyal, he suggested that instead of getting the first Voronoi to break up the larger blocks (like in the first picture) I am going to use my hand placed road splines to break up the planes and then continue with the other steps like in the photos. I would also like to be able to draw out the city area using a closed curve as well, (I think that's a thing?) instead of it just being a boring square.

BUILDING MODULAR KIT PLANNING/BLOCKOUT

Before I could start properly creating the city layout generation tool, I needed to plan the blockout for the building modular kits. This was important so I would then know how large the actual building footprints/blockouts are going to be based on the modular kits. (Like knowing exactly how tall a story is, how wide the buildings need to be in order to fit a reasonable amount of apartments in them.)

So, I started blocking this out in Maya, I went through a lot of back and forth trying to figure out what my ‘standard’ wall dimensions were going to be, trying to align it with real world scale. (Like finding out what the standard height of a wall is, how high off the ground windows are, how tall doors are, how tall balconies are, etc…) While still trying to get it to stay on the grid.

I then started blockout out my window dimensions in order to get variation. These windows were inspired by the windows found in the buildings found in Pripyat, Ukraine. I intend on making different variants of windows in each scale; therefore, I can have more options in combinations for my kit in order to make my buildings more unique from each other.